The Party of Working People Who are Properly Thankful for What's Put in Front of Them

Having hurriedly abandoned her more or less sane pledges on corporate governance, presumably in order to make room for her government's ever more loony gyrations over Europe, Mad Tessie has dispatched her Secretary of State for Profiteering and Fat-Cat Strokage to explain how not keeping a promise is, as the Liberal Democrats might say, really much the same as keeping it, actually. Rather than placing employee representatives on corporate boards, the Government now wishes merely to ensure that workers have a voice, without bothering too much over forcing anyone to listen who might have better things to do, and provided that the voice keeps a properly respectful tone and doesn't say anything silly like Please, sir, I want some more. The favoured proposal seems to be for a non-executive director with an explicit obligation to lecture the proles and hold meetings, which is certainly the sort of radical shake-up that will deter future Philip Greens from excessive additions to the yacht collection. The present system, said Mad Tessie's flunkey, "has been a successful system which has had the confidence of business around the world." To the flunkey's credit, the use of the pluperfect at least demonstrates a welcome if subtle acknowledgement of the confidence business around the world now has, and is likely to go on having, thanks to the Government's blundering Brexit and flatulent Foreign Secretary.